I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.

My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.

Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy's public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I've been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).

Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!

It really looks like it's on an awful trajectory.

In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a "simple" plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.

I'm rambling and it's late. Sympathies and solidarity.

Yeah, it is fucking scary. My sympathies and solidarity. Small thing, perhaps a good reminder for everybody to check their opsec (esp if you are an administrator of things, check which data you do not need, or should not fall into the current (or future) us/other fascist administrations hands. And remember while spying on Americans by the various orgs is illegal, trading for information on them with other countries is not. Don't forget backups). It is horrible that it has come to this. One small point of light is that they are fools and can't shut up or be subtle. At least that has a chance to motivate more people to do something, which if it gets to the worst (and it is getting close) more people will actually resist (sadly a lot of people will have to realize that the point becomes not to win, but to impose costs/friction, and any wins are a bonus, which is a horrible realization in itself). Really hope this doesn't make things worse mentally btw.

It's a complete shitshow and very scary, even just looking at it from the outside, can't imagine what it must feel like from the inside. I keep having to remind myself that all these things that currently happen are real.

I can only offer my solidarity and sympathies. If I were still living in the US, I’d probably have started taking firearms training and bought some by now.

Solidarity from TN

Word of advice to the press: Stop 👏 giving 👏 natalists 👏 free 👏 platforms 👏

Eminently punchable face

Cursor's cofounder jumped in to try and quell the outrage. He is not pulling it off.

That feels like a fitting ironic fate, a company selling AI slopcode generation looses a bunch of users from believing their own bullshit and using an LLM as customer support. Hopefully that story repeated a few dozen times across other businesses and the business majors stop pushing LLM usage.

Edit... looking at the orange site comments... some unironically cited Anthropic research marketing hype, which (correctly) shows "Chain-of-Thought" is often bullshit unrelated to the final answer (but it's Anthropic, so the label it as deception and unfaithfulness instead of the entire approach being bullshit in general).

“why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”

none of these people had a job in manufacturing, or even possibly any real job, it's called CNC and there are way better tools for making it work than stochastic parrot

e: ok at least op is a machinist

Interestingly, many of these models also score at or above the level of some human experts on visual reasoning benchmarks like MMMU. That which is easy to measure often doesn't correlate with real world usefulness.

benchmarks could be perhaps possibly fucked with? say it aint so!

My high level impression when reading the response is “someone who can parrot textbook knowledge but doesn’t know what they’re talking about”.

with corpus consisting of toy problems only, and with solutions that depending on field can kill whoever uses these

Yudkowsky had a gift for making hyperniche concepts accessible.

No, he didn't. His "explanations" are turgid and useless even when they're not just mathematically wrong. They create the feeling of understanding for some readers — those who want their self-image of smartness validated, who imagine that LessWrong is the cool kids' table, and who aren't actually tested on how much they've learned.

Over the course of thousands of pages, rationalist Harry uses logic and decision theory to save the world and defeat Voldemort.

No, he uses his fucking Time Turner.

Snyder seemed to be trying to break through to Yudkowsky with an appeal to his self-importance

OK, zero notes there.

Not sure why anyone thought CS as a community can "save us". It's just as likely to be red/black-pilled (gold/black-pilled?) as any other heavily male tech adjacent community. The idea that nerds should be politically liberal because they were bullied in 80 high-school comedies is ludicrous.

No, I'm sure this time we can identify the person or people who are divinely anointed to exercise absolute power over everyone.

This is really weird because every single person in academia I talked to about non-CS stuff is either a perfectly median centrist social-democrat or literally a member of the local communist party, with zero variation in between those two.

Like it's either you're a young idealist that still believes the world can be better, or you're 40 with three kids and a mortgage that just wants the government to be relatively stable and not fuck shit up for you.

I know zero Americans though, so maybe there's a skew there.

Getting in early on targeting the vibe coder demographic.

Yeah that copy paste commands that give control over your pc shit is pretty nasty. Also over a year old at least. So it isnt specifically an attack at vibe coders. Not sure what the initial targets were but these usually try to target people not that knowledgeable in computer matters so lol that this now includes vibe coders.

Github only catches strays, it's much more widely deployed

Do note how this legion of kid slaves shit shows how he both doesnt believe will go to mars nor that ai/robots can automate things.

You dont make new children to save civilization in 18+ years if you think in 2 years you will go to mars/build robots that automate everything/build the robotgod.

Eurgh!

Musk seems like he's 1cm away from Jeffrey Epstein.

With the collapse of the US empire and hegemony in progress wonder if they actually did something with this or if it is all another thought experiment.

E: wow that users posts history is something. Drops that article 3 years ago. Silence till some weird comment (directly addressing yud claiming they had some big breakthrough, about the mind state of the zizians of course. And it is all speculation and way too verbose).

not every programmer posts to social media...

If Palantir represents a veritable unknown for the public, so too could its UK chief, the grandson of Oswald Mosley and nephew of former F1 president Max Mosley.

Ah, yes, noted grandfather and nothing else, Oswald Mosley. Definitely not the founder of British Union of Fascists, please don't look into that. His son was in the racecar business, isn't that lovely?

Ok that is it, im changing my mind. All the rationalist genetics stuff is real and true as there is a fascism gene.

YIL there was a right-wing antisemitic US general called Moseley

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Van_Horn_Moseley

Nominative determinism?

If OpenAI’s funding round with Softbank goes as planned, it’ll raise the equivalent of the entire GDP of Estonia — a fairly wealthy country itself, and one that’s also a member of Nato and the European Union. That alone should give you a sense of the truly insane scale of this.

so not only saltman is capable of burning enough power to be comparable to middle-sized euro country, he can also burn small euro country gdp

they are not serious people. damn if i only started grifting instead of getting socially useful skillset

Link to vote Ed for eternal podcast president:

https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting?ref=wheresyoured.at#/2025/podcasts/individual-episode/business

eric adams should change his platform to “I’m not cuomo”

Update: another acronym.

I encourage NYC neighbors to spread the idea of deranking. It worked in Portland. We had an exceptionally shitty candidate:

Once touted as the law and order candidate, Gonzalez was the only mayoral candidate cited for breaking the law during the 2024 election cycle.

We pushed to derank him. And the result:

… Gonzalez was the subject of an effort to convince voters not to rank him regardless of the voter's other preferred candidates. Gonzalez earned 20% of first ranked choices but ultimately finished the election in third place …

that "immersion" line is the same shit their support gave me ~3y ago when I opened the app and suddenly got a surprise switch to a new UI (which also put that front and center)

nice to see it hasn't at least gotten worse

Wtf

E: it might have been fixed, now only if they also fixed all the other things. Erugh hate how much they are offloading the 'is this valuable' thing on just how mad (and who) people are getting. Such an extreme social cost (but very 'X but on the blockchain!' techbro style offloading of the costs unto others)

christ. can't he go back to disco, he was good at that

This shit os going to drive so many amateur pedo/etc hunters (who already are not the people who are good at being normal) into absolute crazy conspiracy theory land. Esp when they cant get the fake pimps (yeah pimps really, these cops seem to be like the military dude in the intro of ideocracy) arrested or banned.

E: on that note, saw somebody explain that their previous slightly hysterical, 'facebook is claiming searching for the concentration camps is a search for csam' was made in error as it was the word 'mega' (and another word) which seemed to trigger the warning. And below that people were still making up some crazy palantir is going to get everyone jailed for clicking a csam link conspiracy bullshit. I worry for the sanity of a lot of online people. People are so afraid they are blueanoning themselves

I can see tante's point. Besides AI datacenters being used for surveillance tech, I can also see LLM tech itself used nefariously post-bubble. Maybe maintaining an up-to-date LLM as a product is not viable, but a custom-trained model to snipe public online discourse around a crucial election could remain affordable for a wealthy fascist.

On the bright side, I am hoping for a brief period of powerful yet affordable gaming PCs thanks to retrofitted, slightly singed Blackwells.

I mean, what has crypto left over? All of that is only useful for sanctions busting and money laundering

Orange site really is out here reinventing hard behaviorism.

"We can't directly observe internal states beyond our own subjectivity" -> Let's try to ignore them and see what we get" -> "We've developed a model that doesn't feature internal states as a meaningful element of cognition" -> "there are no internal states" -> "I know I'm a stochastic parrot but what are you?"

some parrots are more stochastic than others

These people need to sit through a college level class on linguistics or something like that. This is a demonstration of why STEM majors need general higher education.

I've repeated this prediction a bajillion times, but I suspect this bubble's discredited the idea of artificial intelligence, and expect it to quickly die once this bubble bursts.

Between the terabytes upon terabytes of digital mediocrity the slop-nami's given us, LLMs' countless and relentless failures in logic and reason, the large-scale enshittification of daily life their mere existence has enabled, and their power consumption singlehandedly accelerating the climate crisis, I feel that the public's come to view computers as inherently incapable of humanlike cognition/creativity, no matter how many gigawatts they consume or oceans they boil.

Expanding on this somewhat, I suspect AI as a concept will likely also come to be seen as an inherently fascist concept.

With the current bubble's link to esoteric fascism, the far-right's open adoration of slop, basically everything about OpenAI's Studio Ghibli slopgen, and God-knows-what-else, the public's got plenty of reason to treat use or support of AI as a severe indictment of someone's character in and of itself - a "tech asshole signifier", to quote Baldur Bjarnason.

And, of course, AI as a concept will probably come to be viewed as inherently anti-art/anti-artist as well - considering how badly the AI bubble's shafted artists, and artists specifically, that kinda goes without saying.

I think we're going to see an ongoing level of AI-enabled crapification for coding and especially for spam. I'm guessing there's going to be enough money from the spam markets to support a level of continued development to keep up to date with new languages and whatever paradigms are in vogue, so vibe coding is probably going to stick around on some level, but I doubt we're going to see major pushes.

One thing that this has shown is how much of internet content "creation" and "communication" is done entirely for its own sake or to satisfy some kind of algorithm or metric. If nobody cares whether it actually gets read then it makes economic sense to automate the writing as much as possible, and apparently LLMs represent a "good enough" ability to do that for plausible deniability and staving off existential dread in the email mines.

Linking this recent comment on an older thread because it was so relevant: https://awful.systems/comment/6966312

TLDR; GPUs cost as much to operate as they normally depreciate over time, so even if the bubble pops people might be sitting on piles of GPUs without reselling or using them.

Comrade Workwear did the same: https://www.shadowbannedmagazine.com/ceosmostwanted/

Even without home/office addresses, NYPD seized the cards: https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?u=41adb4be5bcdf57e710e21504&id=24bc152009

When

…I do not give Instagram or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages or posts, both past and future. With this statement, I give notice to Instagram it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents.

Goes wrong

Source

The article from the screenshot: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/meta-grabs-eu-approval-to-train-ai-with-social-media-posts-1034586675

Clippy with those bedroom eyes

"Lied during the pandemic" wait what? Did LW do a 180 on covid, or is this a "they gave advice without knowing everything that was later shown wrong?" Because that is quite a dumb thing to say, also calling that leftwing is nuts. And last, did they memoryhole that Scott lied about the pandemic? He said people should stop smoking because it helped with covid. Not because he had proof, just because he thought it would be good if less people smoked.

E: oops wrong person.

E2: 100 upvotes, the conspiracy weird far right people have taken over.

To summarize that blog post and the three "Rationalist cases for Trump" that it points to: "We made up a Trump to like and a bunch of Democrats to get mad at".

When exactly did that "left-wing monoculture" flex its muscles? During Trump 1.0? During the first two years of the Biden administration, when leftists and progressives were criticizing that administration every day for not doing enough on, well, anything? During the second half of the Biden administration, when Republicans controlled the House and leftist criticism of the administration, um, did not grow quiet?

Recently, I found myself dealing with a hallucinating Grok (as the xAI chatbot is known). I was working on an article [...] I offered Grok a very specific query: [...] What followed was like an argument with an especially lucid drunk.

Imagine this, but everything and forever.

Edit:

The listeners did become suppliers, in line with Brecht’s democratic vision. Some of us are listening and hearing, but many more of us are shouting over one another, brought into relationships that are as likely to be conflictual as nourishing. That “vast network of pipes” pictured by Brecht turned out to be controlled by the same sort of venal moguls who gave us radio in the first place, and they lined those pipes with lead.

I think calling the current model one where "the listeners became suppliers" is a misunderstanding of how we got here. If the point was to connect people in a two-way link then the context needs to shift away from a third party's efforts to profit from it. Like, we don't see all the crazies and grifters because we seek them out or what they're trying to do, but because it's profitable for the platforms and providers to connect us to them instead of the people we're actually trying to reach, whether that be to hang out with friends/family, learn from a teacher/writer/journalist, or participate in an open society. Our ability to make those connections has been hijacked in order to boost the level of insanity because it's more profitable to take advantage of both sides desire for connection without actually letting either one get what they want or need.

Looking at the reactions here, this is clearly a trick by Altman to have people use their systems more in the hope it costs them money. Don't do it people, don't add to the energy usage.

You’re polite to your chatbot because you want to be spared when the robot uprising comes

I’m polite to my chatbot because I want to bring down capitalism

(Adjusts necktie) We are not the same

If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm

"Please" and "thank you" are only 1-3 tokens, so they only have a major impact on ChatGPT in aggregate.

The ending monologue of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand

@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
Every time I am forced to interact with a customer service chatbot, I politely tell it how miserably it is failing and then ask to communicate with a real living human being.

@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 I think I finally found a good reason to make an account and start using that bilch hose. Just to burn more of their money. Are there any particularly gnarly problems to feed these things. The equivalent a zip-bomb or something?

@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984

Uhh, great. That is really good news. I will be so damn polite to that thing.

@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984

I can't remember who had the quote "A gentleman is someone who is polite to his robot." - possibly Heinlein?

Happy the article is skeptical of both the ai doomers and the ai as social interaction replacers.

Godel Escher Bach but worse

time to start reporting all those maga restaurants and shit